


Adjustments

by Kalael



Category: Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Gen, Implied or Off-stage Rape/Non-con, Physical Abuse, References to Suicide
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-02-07
Updated: 2013-02-07
Packaged: 2017-11-28 13:04:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,140
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/674698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kalael/pseuds/Kalael
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They didn’t know when the cycle really began, but some day in a child’s life someone would say ‘they aren’t real’.  A light would flicker on the globe of believers, sputtering and desperate, and when it finally went out it could never be rekindled.</p><p>A short series on growing up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Fear

**Author's Note:**

> I'm sure I'm not the only one who has wondered why adults are excluded from the protection of the Guardians. And of course it took an angsty turn. This is entirely self-indulgent.

He had always been attracted to the fear of children. They were pure and innocent of mind and heart and their fears were uncomplicated. Fear of pain, fear of loneliness, fear of darkness and monsters and imaginary things that made the world scary for a child under the age of ten.

As children grew up they began to find fear funny, going to haunted houses and laughing at the monsters that popped out at them from behind warped mirrors. They didn’t believe in the Boogeyman anymore, so Pitch let them be lest he be walked through. There was no point in frightening an adult with a creature they would just laugh at. Their closets contained different kinds of skeletons, now,

After his defeat by the Guardians Pitch knew he could not prey on the fear of children any longer. The Guardians were too alert, too wary to let him get even an inch of a foothold in the ‘magical’ world of childhood. Pitch wandered, looking for opportunities where he could. It was pure accident that he discovered that maybe adults weren’t so…untouchable.

She couldn’t have been older than twenty but she had wary eyes and carried a can of mace in the sleeve of her jacket for easy access. It wasn’t unusual to see people walking at night but they rarely went alone if they could avoid it, even on college campuses like this one. She was beautiful, by mortal standards. Dark skin and darker hair and smudged eyeliner at the corners of her eyes. Her clothes suggested that she had just gotten off work and was heading to her dorm.

Pitch watched as every noise made her jump, every shadow made her flinch. She didn’t look it but she was _terrified_. Of what? Not of him, or she would have noticed him trailing behind her like a wraith. He slid closer, careful not to let her pass through him, and focused on the sharp tang of her fear.

Oh. This was a fear he knew only in passing. One he did not condone, one he did not create. He dealt with dark memories but only as a desperate measure, and never memories like this. Pitch pulled out of her head and carefully reset the barriers that she had placed around the memories, but her screams echoed long after he had left her mind.

_No! No no nonono I don’t want this no please god no—_

Pitch slunk back into the shadows, accidentally rustling a trash can and the noise made the girl jump. He was hit with a wave of fear so strong that he could hear it without trying to.

_No not again please god not again—_

He made sure that she got home, her fingers scrambling for her keys and the door slamming behind her as she ran up the stairs. Pitch looked out across the campus. It was quiet, picturesque, a tiny place nestled within the tall skyscrapers of a city. A police officer strolled by with a hard-set mouth and his hand on his gun and Pitch felt his fear as well, the fear of not being able to serve and protect, the fear of failing— _you have already failed one student_ —and Pitch turned away, unable to listen to the voices that barraged him.

Children were afraid of things that went bump in the night, intangible and imaginary, only made real because they believed that they were. Pitch had forgotten that there things beside himself that made people scream. Guns, knives, other people.

The fear that adults felt was complicated and if he wanted he could frighten them into groveling submission at his feet. All he had to do was reach inside and pull out their darkest memories, real fears that he hadn’t caused but could make far worse. It was tempting. The idea of a dark world taken through adults, through the supposed protectors of all life, was something that Pitch could easily grow to like.

_No please no leave me alone let me go—_

Just like that Pitch tossed the scheme aside. Even he wouldn’t dare to use such a fear. It was born of a mindless cruelty that he had overcome eons ago, long since discarded in the ancient ruins of great civilizations and halls drowned beneath the seas. He wouldn’t stoop so low.

A light flickered in a dorm window and a face appeared, eyes staring down at him with a vague hint of recognition before the blinds closed. In another room a freshman leaped onto his bed, irrationally afraid of the dark space beneath the wooden frame. A professor struggled to stay awake in her office, terrified of going home to her husband and adding to the bruises beneath her blouse. Students played with an Ouija board in the basement of the library and held their breath as something unseen spelled out promises of pain and fire. A girl laid in her bathroom as she considered the empty bottle of pills in her hand and the consequences of her actions.

Pitch wasn’t the only thing to be afraid of.


	2. Joy

His snowballs worked on adults, though not for very long. Jack tried everything he could to involve them— _come play with your kids get out of your office go do **something!**_ —but they always turned away with a wistful look in their eyes and half-smiles falling off their lips. He wanted everyone to be happy but when they refused to see what he was trying to give them, he got frustrated. Now that he could be seen by children the sting of failure didn’t hurt so badly, but it still sucked to see your efforts go to waste.

Maybe that’s why it was so painful to watch Jamie waste away from something that Jack couldn’t make better.

Jamie was seventeen, the same age as Jack’s physical form, and definitely not a child anymore. He still believed and that was a blessing. All the kids from that night still believed, even as they prepared for college. Jack had made sure they wouldn’t forget him or the others. However, something was wrong with Jamie. Something that had started a year before and gradually grew worse. Jack’s snowballs didn’t work on him anymore and it became harder and harder to make Jamie laugh. Jamie still smiled, still went outside when he could, but it was…different. He was growing up. He had those half-smiles and wistful eyes and the lack of will to do anything.

Jack had heard about depression but he didn’t really know what it was. His center was Joy, and while he felt sadness (three hundred years alone wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows), he couldn’t comprehend the sort of emptiness that Jamie tried to explain.

“It’s like this black hole.” He said, pressing a hand to his chest. “And it’s sucking away everything inside you, bit by bit, and you can’t feel anything but this vague sense of wrongness that drives you totally crazy.” Jamie then had to explain what a black hole was, so the metaphor was pretty much lost on Jack. He just chalked it up to part of becoming an adult. He selfishly hoped that Jamie wouldn’t turn out like the other grown-ups, busy and tired and definitely not interested in making snow forts with their best friends.

The other kids didn’t act like Jamie, though. They didn’t talk of black holes or wrongness, and they still laughed when he threw snowballs at them. Something was wrong with Jamie and Jack was frightened for him. Sophie, who was twelve, did her best to assuage his fears.

“He goes to talk to a therapist every week. And he takes medicine. He’s going to be okay.” She told him, her tiny hand holding his as she pulled him away from Jamie’s room. “So let him sleep, okay? He sleeps a lot. I think Sandy tries to send him lots of good dreams to make him happy.” Jack looked at the closed bedroom door that hid Jamie from view and resolved to ask Sandy about Jamie’s predicament. The other Guardians would probably understand better than he did.

Late at night Jack followed the streams of golden sand to where Sandy was conducting a fantastic sand parade throughout the city of Burgess.

“Sandman!” He greeted cheerfully, and Sandy waved happily at him. “Hey buddy, I have a question. It’s about Jamie.”

Sandy was an expressive person, since he couldn’t speak. So when his expression drooped, Jack immediately knew that something was up.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with him. He has depression but I don’t know what that means. Sophie said he goes to a therapist and takes medicine but it’s not like he’s sick, right?” Sickness wasn’t so scary, because the body could fight it off. This thing that Jamie had wasn’t going away. Sandy tried to explain through a series of images, which Jack interpreted with ease. That didn’t mean that he liked the answer. 

“So…he’s sick, but in the head? It’s not going to just go away?” Sandy shook his head. Well, there went that hope. “And that means that he’s pretty much just…sad. All the time. And no one can fix it?” A bottle of pills appeared over Sandy’s head and Jack presumed that meant that the medication was supposed to help. He sighed heavily and looked in the direction of the Bennett household.

“Alright. Okay. I can do my best to be supportive. He’s my best friend, after all.” He didn’t acknowledge the way his voice cracked because he just couldn’t grasp the idea that someone could be so sad without reason. Sandy patted his shoulder with a sympathetic expression. Jack tossed him a weak smile then tore off into the night, the wind pulling him to the pond he called home so that he could think. He decided that he wouldn’t treat Jamie any differently, though he would try to spend more time with him.

It turned out that Jamie was the same boy he’d always been. His interests had changed a bit, sure, but he was still obsessed with the supernatural and liked to talk to Jack about the amazing things that he’d seen over the past few centuries. The only thing that was really different was the fact that Jamie slept a lot and laid around and there were days when he could barely move, barely speak. Jack tried to act like nothing was different. He pestered Jamie to go outside and talked through the silence when Jamie couldn’t hold up his end of the conversation.

It didn’t magically cure Jamie but it was better than just letting him drown in that black hole of his. Jamie still talked about it sometimes, when Jack tried to understand.

“You know how you go numb in the cold?” Jack knew that much, he’d been numb for a long time. “It’s like that, but on the inside. Everything is dulled down. Even sadness isn’t that strong. You’re always tired and you can’t really sleep without help from—from pills, or from Sandy. You don’t have the energy to do anything. It just feels,” Jamie made a vague gesture with his hand and for a moment there was a look of complete loss on his face, “it feels like you’re never going to get better, you’re going to be stuck in the same place forever, and you’re never going to be okay again.”

“You’re going to be okay. I’ll always be here for you.” Jack pulled Jamie in for a hug with a fierce promise and he missed the way Jamie glanced out the window, his eyes tracing the frost patterns that Jack had brought with him.

“I trust you.” Jamie said, but there was something in his voice that didn’t sound quite right. “Do you think you could give me a snow day?”

“Of course!” Jack beamed and agreed easily, because Jamie hadn’t asked in a while. So the next weekend he gave them over two feet of snow and for the first time in a year Jamie ran outside in his snow gear. They built snow forts and had a neighborhood-wide snowball fight and it was like before, when Jamie was still a kid and it was so hard to believe that he was eighteen years old now, with the way that he smiled and laughed.

It was harder to believe that he was only eighteen when he walked out at night and laid in the snow until he fell asleep, Sandy’s dream sand too late to find him and Jack too far away to help him because he had told Jamie that he had a scheduled snowstorm in Vermont, told him that he would be gone, told him that things would be fine and then they _weren’t._

Jack understood depression, now.


End file.
